Saturday, August 25, 2012

I finished painting my Avarian fleet on Thurday evening, so I thought I'd share some pics of it:

My 3 previous fleets from Starfleet Wars have each a unique color pattern: blue for the Aquarians, Yellow for the Carnivorans and Green for the Entomolians. Therefore, my avarians needed a different color to stand apart from these.

The problem was that I wanted this fleet to be colorful, as to represent a birdy species. The solution was to make them colorful but with red being the predominant color.

With the friday night free, I had some time to work on my Terrans, which arrived this week (one week after my Avarians!). I already cleaned the flash, washed them and based the big boys with corsec omni-stands, and now I only need to base the smal ships and fighters and then we're ready for primer!

I'll be painting this fleet after Kurfurst's scheme, from the Starfleet Wars 2 blog. Here are some examples of his paint job on them:

As I'm going out on a work travel next week, I probably won't even get to prime them before returning home at September, 5, also because I plan on using some of my free time this weekend to come up with more ship stats for Pax Stellarum.

Friday, August 17, 2012

My Avarian fleet arrived today, after 2 months... Usually, international packages sent to me as priority shipping arrive in a month, but USPS messed it up this time and sent my birdies to Germany, instead, so it took 2x the regular schedule for them to arrive at my door.

The good side is that my paint desk was kind of empty for the last couple months, which allowed me to work on Pax Stellarum with ease of mind.

The bad side is that my Terrans, purchased a month after the avarians, are almost arriving as well, which means I either work hard to get the Avarians ready in record time or my paint desk is soon going to look like downtown during the rush hour!

I'm very please with most of the designs, but a couple ship classes looked too antiquated. Ok, they are old designs, and part of their charm is their antiquated look, but 2 classes in particular were over the top. They were the Hawk Class Destroyer and the Falcon Class Cruiser.

To work this out, I decided to try applying some (minor) changes to these 2 classes, and turns out I'm very pleased with the results:

Hawk Class destroyer, converted (left) and original

Falcon Class Cruiser, converted (right) and original

The Avarians are the most advanced race in Starfleet Wars, but not so advanced as to be portrayed as Extemely Advanced Ships (EAS) in Pax Stellarum. These are ships that are allowed to ignore some of the restrictions on the design rules.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

I've spent the last couple months focused on Pax Stellarum, and left the painting part of the hobby neglected. Now that the ruleset is complete, I decided to go gack to the paint desk and have something done.

I came back from work early today, and used this extra free time to paint my space marine captain converted into a Black Templar Castellan.

Here are the pics:

This mini took me 2.5 hours to paint (after primer), which is pretty efficient, considering that I also painted 2 extra arms for my dreads, too.

Overall, my technique on painting 28mm is really improving, which is always reassuring.

Now, back to the computer to design more ships for Pax Stellarum. I'm going to work hard over the weekend to have as many ship stats done as I can.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

I'm glad to announce my homebrew spaceship gaming ruleset, Pax Stellarum, is ready! I just uploaded the files on my googledocs page. You can follow the link on the upper rigth corner of this blog to check them.

There you will find:

- The Rulebook

- The Design Rules (becoming availabe soon)

- The Design Tool

- The Critical Hit Table

- The Quick Reference Table

- The Token Sheet

The design rules explain what are the rules to build you own ships and weapons. You don't necessarily have to read it to be able to use the Design tool. This is a ".xls" document that is already programed to inform you in case you select any illegal item for what you're designing. But the Design Rules are there so you can eventually check them to understand why the Design Tool keeps saying you've "violated the limits for item xxx"!

The design rules is on final stage of formatting, so I'll be uploading it in a few days.

The Critical Hit table and the Quick Reference Table are supplied to allow players to check the most important aspects of the game without having to go look for them on the rulebook while playing.

Last, the token sheet provides all the basic tokens needed to play the game on ready-to-cut format.

I suggest for those interested in giving the game a try that you first try out the basic rules, and as you feel confortable with them, go ahead adding more and more of the advanced rules. There is so much stuff to be explored on this game, it takes time. Even I don't remember all the rules by memory (!)

The core mechanics have all been extensively playtested, but there are several advanced elements that I simply could not playtest thoroughly enough before releasing it. It's humanly impossible for a single person to do so in a reasonable timeframe.

So, I leave the task for you guys to point out any elements that may seem broken or that could be improved.

Feedback will hopefully make this game better, although it is already as much fun as I was looking for in a spaceship gaming ruleset.

The are a several ships already designed for the most popular sci-fi universes, allowing players to test the game right away. They are: